October 16, 2014

Are some football managers experts in collaboration?

I love football. I love Arsenal lead by the enigmatic, wily Frenchman Arsene Wenger, who said many years ago, "The intelligent player realises the team is the real star". And those of you who follow football around the world know that despite a long trophy drought, most football fans, commentators and pundits agree that Arsenal plays the most attractive form of football in the English Premier League. In fact, very much on par with with Barcelona, who tend to buy a lot of Arsenal players.

Now there's some research to support this pearl of wisdom but first some background.

One of the key discoveries so far of Complexity Theory is that co-operative processes in general seem far more likely to survive than isolated, rampantly selfish entities. This moves successful evolution away from the original 'principle of natural selection' to a more holistic, symbiotic view of adaptability, wherein survival is a group or team effort.

"Researchers looked at three sports: basketball, soccer, and baseball. In each sport, they calculated both the percentage of top talent on each team and the teams’ success over several years. For both basketball and soccer, they found that top talent did in fact predict team success, but only up to a point. Furthermore, there was not simply a point of diminishing returns with respect to top talent, there was in fact a cost. Basketball and soccer teams with the greatest proportion of elite athletes performed worse than those with more moderate proportions of top level players.

The most fascinating insight is how baseball is one game where too much talent is not a problem as it does not rely on nearly as much team cooperation because it's a game where fundamentally of one player against a whole team (not unlike cricket). Read the whole thing.

If you think about it, with hindsight our social history is almost embarrassingly about collective effort, rather than individual triumph. If you're an Arsenal fan you'll know that we often say that "Arsene knows". His nickname has been 'The Professor' in the past, even though he makes the most inexplicable, often infuriating decisions about the team and his players. Has he been ahead of the game all this time? Is doing better with less the next big thing in collaboration?

September 26, 2014

It's hard to make any kind of assessmemt about the content at Social Media Week in London because I was only there for a few hours. Lee Bryant from PostShift, Eva Appelbaum from the BBC and yours truly from Sei Mani hosted a panel discussion on how social media teams that 'face outwards' can 'face inward' using their knowledge and insights to influence their organisations in changing the way they work. After all, if customers are organised in networks then companies have to find ways of being network centric as well.

Judging by the questions and reactions on Twitter it seems that 'agents' working at the coal face feel a little powerless in their ability to influence internal social collaboration and perhaps underrate the value they can bring to their colleagues.

The venue was very 'underground' and quite edgy and very well managed. Well done to the conference organisers.

My message was that social media teams do have influence even through they lack the authority in terms of traditional power and there are some simple things they can do exercise that influence.

September 17, 2013

Social Collaboration

Workforce transformation means different things to people. Colin Miles, Virgin Media's Director ot IT Technical Services and Leon Benjamin, co-founder of Sei Mani present the learnings of a three year journey into the deployment of a wide range of social collaboration tools used to solve some old problems; connecting organisational silos, employee engagement, work/life balance, reduced T&E.

The biggest lesson learned is that value creation is the point of collaboration, not the act or tool of collaboration itself.

June 30, 2013

Why do we stop sharing when we start working?

Very clever video from IBM on the definition of social business. So clear, so simple. If there was an Oscar category for best business video this would win it for turning a complicated set of ideas into plain English.

The much bigger story is how IBM has not censored some of the quite sick, ugly comments that have absolutely no relevance. That takes courage, openness and authenticity.

Hat tip to you IBM. I would remove some comments and send the trolls links to some other places where they can rant and rave.

May 19, 2012

In 2012, 81% of top Asian companies have a branded social media presence compared to just 10% in 2010. McKinsey reports this year that China has the world's largest community of social networkers, with 95% of web users in large cities maintaining a social media profile of some kind. One of the primary drivers of enterprise social media platforms in the West is the need for companies to be better organised internally to communicate with their customers who spend most of their online time in social networks. “The biggest challenge CEOs face today is getting their enterprises closer to their customers” (CEO, MoxieSoft)

The demand for enterprise social media platforms comes mostly from HR, Operations and Property functions and with the increasing use of social media in Asia many CIO’s will be unprepared to understand, debate and advise on its deployment with their peers on the board. This talk describes why social software is at its most transformative inside the organisation, how this specifically relates to IT, what CIOs should be doing to support the business, and how to influence its widespread adoption within the organisation.

April 14, 2012

I've long argued that if companies want to interact with social networks, they must themselves become social networks.

That's the whole point of 'social business'. When a company wants to roll out a customer facing social media initiative the first question I ask is how are you collaborating inside? How are you being like your customer? I get too many replies of 'what's that got to do with it?'. Everything - it's the whole game. The very clever people at Dachis Group have articulated this in a single picture here:

Get it now? Social software is actually most transformative inside the company.

February 17, 2012

The biggest untold story of the 21st century is about the end of command and control as a useful model for orgainising the production of goods and services. Network centric, self-organisingpeer-to-peer models of organisation aren’t just preferable, they’re a matter of survival. This talk will explain why becoming a social business isn’t just about new ways of working but the creative destruction of a 5,000 year old model of organisation that’s passed its sell by date. Question is, can you handle it?